


Healed Over

by ferix79



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Discovery, Fluff, M/M, Massage, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 05:22:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6410500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferix79/pseuds/ferix79
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryoma and Marx explore each other's scars one night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Healed Over

Another fic inspired by a headcanon from acepalindrome on tumblr!  
[Reblog it on tumblr here.](http://ferix-writes.tumblr.com/post/141979274884/acepalindrome-ryoumarx-exploring-each-others)

\---

Yet another busy day has reached its end, and the crown prince of Nohr decides to relax in he and his husband’s bed with a last few reports to skim over before turning in. Clad in nothing but a pair of loose shorts—the summer is hot and unforgiving, even at night—he fluffs up his pillows and reclines with the papers. 

Ryoma decides to grace the room with his presence not five minutes into the first report, not that Xander minds much. The needs of his kingdom are pressing, but he is learning, ever so slowly, to give himself a break on occasion. His eyes do not leave the words written on the paper as his husband undresses in the background. 

“What, not even a good night kiss?” Xander lets out quite an undignified ‘oof!’ when Ryoma flops into their bed, and his lap. The other man is dressed similarly—too similar, in fact, until Xander notices that those are indeed a pair of his shorts. He rolls his eyes as Ryoma positions himself between his calves, splayed out over the lower half of the bed. 

“Well, perhaps if you hadn’t interrupted me,” the Nohrian says. One of his hands winds its way into his husband’s thick hair as he continues his reading. 

Ryoma lets his eyes wander the prince’s form, and eventually they land on three long lines running diagonal down the side Xander’s leg, the longest stretching from his knee nearly down to his ankle bone, and the two behind it consecutively smaller. He can’t say that he’s ever noticed this scar before. 

“Did you get attacked by a bear?” He asks out of the blue as he traces his fingers along the scars, each of them thin yet jagged. 

He can feel Xander giving him a look before he realizes what Ryoma’s referring to. “Elise likes to tell that to people. She’s gotten a surprising amount of the army to believe her. Or perhaps it’s not so surprising, given her…charms.” He rolls his eyes with a smirk, lowering the report from his gaze. 

“So what really happened?” Ryoma inches closer to the other man, folding his arms across Xander’s thighs and pillowing his head upon them. His eyes are eager like a child’s for a story. Xander sighs dramatically and puts the paper aside, not that he expected to get much done. 

“I was, oh, a young teen I think, and very serious about my training. I had just passed the age where I could attend court and my father’s meetings such, but every minute I wasn’t with him I was out in the training yards—riding horses, practicing with a sword and a lance, exercising with the army’s trainees, everything. So, one evening—”

“Everything but swimming, apparently.” Ryoma interrupts. Xander shoots him a glare and taps the other man’s side with his foot.

“So, one evening,” he emphasizes, “I went out for a jog around the castle grounds. As I rounded the last corner of the path, just about to finish, I tripped and fell.” Ryoma’s eyebrows rise, ‘That’s it?’ written all over his face. Xander is quick to come to his own defense. 

“The path was made entirely of gravel! Do you know what it’s like to have your bare skin skid across gravel?” Its just so easy to get him flustered, Ryoma thinks, smirking as his lover continues his rant, “So I stumbled to my feet, trying to find what I could have tripped on, and to this day I swear there was nothing in the path. But nonetheless, I staggered back up to the castle proper, blood pouring down my leg, and opened the first door I found. Out of sheer luck, I had ended up in some sort of linen closet. Or perhaps more of a rag closet. I had never been in any of the servant’s areas, so I hadn’t the slightest clue.”

Ryoma chuckles at the other man’s dramatics, reaching up and intertwining their fingers. “My poor winter moon, how did you ever survive on your own?” Xander scoffs at the pet name like he always does, blushes, and then looks away. He loves it. 

“I ended up using half those rags to stem the flow of blood. It just wouldn’t stop,” he says, and Ryoma squeezes his hand, this time in heartfelt compassion for Xander’s younger self, “The whole room smelt like blood by the time I left, leaving behind a bin of soiled rags in my wake. I limped back to my room with a few of them tied around my leg, then washed and bandaged myself up. I was very thankful to wear long trousers for court those next few weeks.”

Ryoma hummed, eyes still trained on Xander as he waited for him to continue the story. But the other man didn’t. Was that it then? He fell and tore his leg open and just went about his business? 

“Is that all?” He asks, drawing Xander’s eyes to his, “You didn’t go to the medics for proper bandages, or a salve or anything?” Xander shrugs.

“No, I didn’t feel the need to, though that was a combination of many things,” he explains, letting go of Ryoma’s hand in favor of running his hands down the other man’s arms, kneading out the tension he knows is there. His ministrations draw Ryoma closer and he reclines as the Hoshidan moves up to lay his head on Xander’s stomach. 

Ryoma is enticed by the massage and attention, but he knows this trick too well. Anytime Xander starts to get uncomfortable from talking about himself he would move the spotlight to Ryoma in the form of physical attention. A dirty trick, if Ryoma does say so himself, but he’s proud to say he’s only fallen for it a few times. “Go on,” he encourages. 

“Well,” Xander huffs, “As I said, I was just beginning to be seen as an adult and an heir to the throne in the eyes of the court. I couldn’t shirk my responsibilities due to an injury like that. And on top of that, I didn’t want my younger siblings to worry. Camilla and Leo had their plates full enough, young as they were.”

“But mainly,” his touches move up Ryoma’s forearm, causing the man’s hand to twitch and curl unconsciously, “This was around the time Nohr really began running short on resources. Crops wouldn’t grow. People went hungry. Trade stagnated. I… didn’t think my injury grave enough to waste medicine on. Not when real soldiers needed it.” 

There it was. “A noble reason, I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.” Ryoma lifts his head from Xander’s stomach, frees his arm from the other man’s grasp and reaches up to cup his lover’s cheek, “But I’d hope you have a bit more of a sense of preservation these days.” 

Xander smiled against Ryoma’s hand, leaning in to the touch, “With you, my sun and my stars, at my side, I needn’t worry.” 

He’d never admit it, but his heart may have skipped a beat at the look in those eyes. Ryoma had to give it to Xander; the man was good when he wanted to be. 

The Hoshidan prince rolls out of Xander’s lap and in to a sitting position, and immediately Xander’s hands are back on him. Dirty trick or not, the Nohrian prince loves giving Ryoma attention, and who is Ryoma to refuse?

“What about you?” Xander asks, swathing his thumbs over the palm of Ryoma’s right hand “What’s this from?” A few inches below his ring and pinkie finger lays a raised patch of skin. It’s barely noticeable, has been healed over a thousand times, but under the soft pressure of his thumbs Xander can feel it. There’s a matching scar on the top side of the Hoshidan’s hand. 

Ryoma laughs at first, “From when I was a child. I was roughhousing with some of the other sons of visiting nobles. We wandered out to the stables and I got pushed over. My hand landed on a horseshoe nail.” Ryoma gently pulls his hand from Xander’s grasp to examine the old scar, or more like Xander lets his hand go.

“A horseshoe nail?” The prince is flabbergasted at the idea, “What did your father say?” 

“Oh, nothing much,” he sighs, “Mainly that we shouldn’t have been playing so rough. The maids cleaned and bandaged me up and I was on my way again. People think like that about children—that they’ll grow out of injuries and be fine in the end.” He turns his hand over and stretches his arm out, clenching his fingers a few times, smile fading from his eyes, “I’ve never had much feeling in my last two fingers because of that.”

Xander says nothing, but grasps the other man’s hand again and presses a kiss to his palm, then onto the aforementioned fingers. The warmth returns to Ryoma’s eyes again, “I can feel a little pressure with them, like the grip of a sword or rocks on the ground, but heat and cold not so much. But they tingle sometimes, like they’ve fallen asleep,” he scrunches his nose at the thought, “only in the winter months, however. Thankfully, Hoshido doesn’t have much of that.”

Xander smiles with him and they continue like that, hands exploring each other’s bodies, tracing scars and massaging old wounds that look like they still hurt as bad as the day they were inflicted. A deep mark on Ryoma’s bicep came from Takumi accidentally hitting him with an arrow while he was learning to shoot. Xander was once thrown from his horse in battle, but his shoe caught in the stirrup. His horse dragged him several yards before a fellow soldier freed him. A long scar spanning his back and up his ribs was the result. 

“I’d never asked you about this one on your knee,” Xander begins as he presses his palms firmly down one of Ryoma’s thighs. Several smaller scars litter his skin there— the result of a wild animal attack, Ryoma tells him. The Hoshidan groans in relief from the massage. “What’s the story behind that?” His hands move to trace the outside of the other man’s knee where the mottled scar lies. It’s large, and uneven, like a splash of blood on the ground, and Xander can’t imagine what inflicted it. 

“Very early on in the war I was foolish and too brave,” Ryoma says, moving to sit up on his elbows and watch Xander trace the scarred skin delicately, “And not wearing enough armor, an enemy soldier caught me unawares with a spiked mace, so that was the result.” Xander’s eyes widen and he draws in a sharp breath. Gods, what that must have felt like, he wonders. 

“I’ve seen you, when you dress for battle,” he comes to a realization, “you wear braces under your armor and clothing. So this is why?” 

Ryoma nods. “I was lucky to escape with my leg, the healers told me. Had he struck harder, had the mace gone deeper, I would not have had such luck.” He explains, taking Xander’s hand and pulling the man down to lie with him. Xander’s head settles on his chest and Ryoma’s fingers find their way into wavy blonde hair. “I had bone fractures, torn muscles; I couldn’t put an ounce of weight on it. Thankfully, we had a skilled team of medics. They worked through the night to put me back together as best they could, but even after that it took weeks for me to walk on my own again. Those were…trying months.” 

“I can imagine…” Xander murmurs and loops an arm around the strong waist beneath him, focusing on the steady beat of Ryoma’s heart. He feels his lover’s hands wander away from his scalp and down his neck, finally finding purchase again on his shoulder. 

“I’ve seen this one before,” Ryoma starts, rubbing slowly up and down Xander’s arm, “But sometimes if you turn the right way in the sunlight it looks like it’s barely there, so I could never really get a good look at it.” A wide, fractal pattern runs down his shoulder and outer bicep like an intricate root system, and each small, snaking line feels ever so slightly raised to the touch. “Care to explain it?”

“It’s much simpler than you think, probably,” Xander says, weariness creeping into his voice. It’s been a long day, though they are all long. “An opposing mage struck me with a lightning spell in battle. It hurt like the devil, of course, but with Elise’s healing I was able to shake it off. I could barely believe my eyes as I took my armor off later. The castle healers said it may fade, but there it has been ever since that day.” He lets his eyes drift closed, lulled by the even pattern of Ryoma’s breathing. 

The Hoshidan prince hums in acknowledgement, lightly tracing the jagged designs a while longer before letting his head recline back onto the pillow. 

“I’m glad we are able to watch out for each other in battle, now.” The deep rumble of his voice stirs Xander. 

“Yes,” he says, nuzzling into the man below him again, “Perhaps less scars are in our future.”

**Author's Note:**

> If youve never looked up scars from lightning strikes they're kind of cool in a creepy way.
> 
> [My tumblr](http://ferix-writes.tumblr.com/)


End file.
